Current trends in information technology show that the vast majority of companies are moving to distributed service-oriented architectures having software services deployed across their computing infrastructure. The success of such deployments is determined in part by how the services affect the quality and performance of the mission-critical applications with which they interface. As such, it is critical to understand the service quality of these services as well as the applications they support.
Determining the service quality of a software application is seldom as straightforward as a simple evaluation of a metric value against a baseline or threshold. Rather, the service quality of an application may depend on various contextual considerations instead of any one specific metric. Therefore, it is desirable to develop improved techniques for evaluating service quality of applications residing in a distributed computing environment.
This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.